SAP executives, led by CEO Christian Klein, told IT and business leaders attending this year’s SAP Sapphire event that by tapping into SAP’s “flywheel” combination of the broadest suite of enterprise apps, context-aware data, and world-class Business AI, they can conquer uncertainty. In a kickoff keynote at the Orlando event, they unveiled a raft of new AI tools, business apps, and partnerships designed to help customers overcome these challenges, transform their operations, and “bring out your best.” Uncertainty “All of us face one problem – every company, no matter which industry or geography. And that problem is uncertainty,” said Klein. “Uncertainty about trade disruption, about new regulatory requirements, and about how AI will transform my business and impact my workforce.” SAP can’t take away macroeconomic uncertainty, he said, “But you have my commitment that we will help your business become more resilient and more resilient – especially in times like these. We will help you bring out your best.” Flywheel effect SAP can do this by utilizing what Klein and other senior SAP executives called the “flywheel effect,” explaining that in physics this is about bringing individual elements together to create new energy. “The first element of the SAP flywheel is our applications,” Klein explained. “Not only do we have the broadest application portfolio in our industry, we also run the most-mission critical business processes end-to-end. No one understands business and industry like SAP does.” The second element of the flywheel is data. “The apps give us the richest treasure of mission-critical business data, and no other tech company has more access to semantically rich business data,” he said. This data then feeds into the third element of the flywheel: AI. Having access to an enormous amount of business data is key to developing extremely powerful Business AI. SAP Business Suite “Then we make the flywheel spin by infusing AI back into the apps, which run your company,” Klein said before introducing the first of several on-stage demos showing how a company can manage uncertainty like shifting tariffs with the power of SAP Business Suite and AI. Expanding the flywheel theme, Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE leading SAP Product and Engineering, noted that the demo highlighted how the flywheel of apps, data, and AI is critical to the company’s quest to reimagine business applications. To achieve this, a company needs an application suite that is end-to-end and seamlessly integrated; a data layer that provides a harmonized data model with high-quality data, strong governance and a rich semantical context; and AI that is built on high-quality data and natively available in the apps used every day. Alam noted that while the concept of the flywheel effect isn’t new and most company CIOs have been working hard to achieve it, they have been frustrated by the disparate and heterogeneous applications landscape often built up over time out of necessity. Fragile balance Most companies spend a significant amount of time and money integrating the apps they use together and extracting and bringing together disparate data sets. “In fact,” Alam said, “We estimate that organizations can spend up to 80 percent of their effort and budget in putting together this fragile balance of apps and data, leaving only 20 percent of your resources to focus on value creation.” While this fragile balance has existed for a while, he explained that it breaks down completely in the age of AI, because to create exponential value you need to have your data available with the end-to-end business process context. “Enabling this in a disparate, disconnected landscape is close to impossible,” he said. The only real solution is to move to a best of breed as a suite, or what SAP calls “suite-as-a- service,” Alam told the audience. “The new SaaS is what will allow you to take advantage of the flywheel effect.” “In the age of AI, true differentiation will lie in how you create value from this end-to-end context for your organization,” he said. “This can only happen when you simplify and innovate your core, and not add another layer of complexity to your landscape.” This is what the SAP Business Suite offers. SAP Business Data Cloud Klein and Alam also emphasized the importance of the launch of SAP Business Data Cloud in February and its positive reception from customers and partners. Klein described it as “the crystal ball we need in times of uncertainty, because it offers you the biggest semantical data layer in the industry harmonizing SAP and non-SAP data.” Klein also announced the expansion of business data analysis capabilities in SAP Business Data Cloud through a new partnership with Palantir, while Alam unveiled a new partnership with Adobe to develop an intelligent application on SAP Business Data Cloud that combines SAP Cloud ERP data with data in the Adobe Experience Platform. To enhance the power of the flywheel, Klein and Philipp Herzig, CTO and chief AI officer of SAP, also made a series of AI-related announcements. “At SAP, our goal is to make every end user 30 percent more productive,” said Klein. Joule To achieve this goal, SAP is enabling end users to use human language to interact with Joule, SAP’s generative AI copilot, as our new UX, he said. Joule will provide answers to any business questions they have, while in the backend, very smart Joule Agents will take over tasks from employees across end-to-end processes. “Today we are proud to announce that we are making Joule available to you everywhere and giving you answers on everything,” the SAP CEO said. By combining Joule with WalkMe, the adoption platform acquired by SAP last year, Joule becomes an omnipresent, always-on, proactive, and personalized AI assistant. “No matter in which app the end user is working, SAP or non-SAP, Joule will be everywhere,” Klein said. In addition to making Joule available everywhere, SAP is also enabling Joule to answer everything through a new partnership with Perplexity whose CEO, Aravind Srinivas, joined Klein onstage to demonstrate how Perplexity’s answer engine will integrate with SAP data to provide trusted answers to everyday business questions. Business AI During his keynote section, Herzig highlighted the progress made with SAP Business AI. “We committed that 80 percent of our most-used transactions would be managed via Joule, and we have delivered more than 1,600 skills supporting a wide range of tasks across HR, finance, supply chain, and more out-of-the-box,” he said. “We also introduced Joule for developers and Joule for consultants, helping tens of thousands of people every day to achieve more.” Herzig said SAP is on track to deliver more than 400 AI scenarios by the end of this year, and he is thrilled to see more than 34,000 customers are already using SAP Business AI every day to transform the way they work. For example, he shared that British Telecom is already saving 85 percent of the time it took to find the right skilled candidates for jobs with Joule, which is also helping employees to complete HR tasks in 40 percent less time. “Our AI strategy is super simple, it’s really about three things,” Herzig said. “Joule as the new UI in the age of AI, its Joule Agents to reimagine business processes and AI Foundation on SAP BTP, which is becoming the operating system for AI.” Joule Agents While Joule transforms the experience layer, Herzig said, Joule Agents are transforming the business process layer, “reimagining business processes from the ground up.” Instead of designing enterprise apps around the principle of “insight-to-action,” Joule Agents streamline decision-making through reasoning and action. “With this, we are making a paradigm shift in enterprise software, going really from insight to action to reason and action with AI,” Herzig said. “Joule Agents will take your business processes to a completely new level.” Soon, he said, companies will have a huge team of agents – Joule Agents, third-party agents, and custom agents built in Joule Studio – as part of their workforce. To control and govern these agents, Herzig announced the launch of AI agent hub in SAP LeanIX. “SAP LeanIX already knows your business processes and enterprise application landscape, so it was just a logical step to expand the methodology to Joule Agents too,” he said. Among other innovations, Herzig announced that SAP is introducing more than 60 new and updated capabilities into AI Foundation, including a prompt optimizer in AI Foundation developed in joint collaboration with Not Diamond, a frontier AI lab out of San Francisco. Prompt optimizerautomatically converts existing prompts to different models, and a futuristic new partnership with Neura Robotics and Nvidia is designed to blend digital and physical worlds and help empower humanoid robots to achieve business outcomes. SAP runs SAP Rounding out the kickoff keynote, Sebastian Steinhaeuser, chief operating officer and newest member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, explained how the company has achieved considerable gains by running its own operations on SAP using the combined power of apps, data, and AI. “With Joule, our developers, consultants, and HR are seeing strong efficiency benefits today. Across SAP, we track several hundreds of millions in AI-powered efficiency gains committed to our budget.” Steinhaeuser also discussed the benefits of SAP Business Data Cloud, noting, “Earlier this year, we became customer zero of SAP Business Data Cloud, offering us distinct advantages: First, we can connect all data in one semantically rich data layer. Second, this helps us generate better insights faster, and across our financial, workforce, and sales planning. And third, we can fuel even better Business AI.” Next up, he said, we are excited to go live with the first set of intelligent applications, starting with People Intelligence. Moving to SAP’s own app layer, Steinhaeuser shared more about SAP’s own RISE with SAP journey. He also emphasized the importance of tools like SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX in mapping process landscapes and enterprise architecture, for SAP’s own transformation journey. “Many of our meetings no longer start with PowerPoint, instead we use Signavio and LeanIX to discuss how we can improve our processes and architecture,” he said. Summary Summing up the keynote messages, Christian Klein said: “Together we have seen how the SAP Business Suite infused with Business AI can help you in times of uncertainty, and how we help you to get there faster, simpler, and at lower cost.” “Let me finish this keynote with a personal commitment which is really dear to my heart: We will continue to listen to your needs, we will continue to deliver great innovations, and we will stay by your side along the entire journey – especially in times of uncertainty – so that you can run your business in sheer harmony.” This story also appears on SAP.com. #sap #unveils #new #capabilities #help